To the Thawing Wind
by The Carnivorous Muffin
Summary: Ten years after his death Light Yagami is resurrected only to find himself alone in a garden whose tending he had long since forgotten. Defeating a god is always more complicated than it seems. AU/Post victory Near
1. Chapter 1

"_Greatness is a transitory experience. It is never consistent. It depends in part upon the myth-making imagination of humankind. The person who experiences greatness must have a feeling for the myth he is in. He must reflect what is projected upon him. And he must have a strong sense of the sardonic. This is what uncouples him from belief in his own pretensions. The sardonic is all that permits him to move within himself. Without this quality, even occasional greatness will destroy a man_"

-Dune, Frank Herbert

* * *

Imagine a gray horizon and landscape. The clouds and rain washed away all signs of color, it was still raining the black umbrellas attempting to shield it but only diverting their path for a small amount of time. Life, they thought, was like that rain. There was no diverting it, no delaying it, only a desperate acceptance of feeling that cold ache in one's bones and seeing nothing but sleet above one's head. (Some say that this was how it should have been but there were older laws than man's even then…)

Death and the funeral always march onward as they always have, undisturbed.

A boy stood by the grave of his mother trying desperately to hold back the tears. He wouldn't succeed. Then again the adults surrounding him, his father, weren't succeeding either. The rain helped to uphold the illusion of stoicism, at the very least.

Everyone dies. That's what they had been told. It's true. Everyone does die. Even the Shinigami in their sunless kingdom of black sand above the clouds have this written in their ten commandments. They tried not to repeat this fact to themselves at the bedside of the coffin and the dirt but they said it none the less. Everyone dies.

Some people though, for one reason or another, come back.

(Though this too has supposedly been forbidden by the laws of that other world, sometimes the laws are ignored or overlooked.)

The funeral was interrupted by such an occasion. It was the boy who noticed. He turned from his father at the sound of knocking, a distant pounding against the earth, from below. The grave next to his mother's, it sounded as if someone was knocking from inside the gates of hell. He looked to his father but he hadn't noticed, the knocking became slightly louder. Yet it was almost indistinguishable from the rain, almost not out of the ordinary. He gripped his father's arm. The funeral proceeded.

The ground began to shift in the grave next to his mothers'. He read the name over his shoulder, though it was faded and untended. He wondered who that poor forgotten man might have been, that his grave had been so forgotten, he hoped that his mother's would look better in the end. He saw her then, no flowers, her name faded away into dust. No, that wouldn't happen to her.

Light Yagami. (Such an old, symbolic, and altogether dead name). He couldn't read the inscription. Just as well, there wasn't much there to be said.

They only turned when it was too late, when the spectacle had already occurred and the first bleeding pale hand grasped for dim sunlight that wasn't there. It was followed closely behind by another bleeding hand rubbed raw with dirt and rock. They did stare then there on funeral forgotten, the mother dead left forgotten, such is the way of the funeral and of death.

They watched the agonizing moments not daring to move as the man managed to pull himself out of his own grave. No one helped but no one ran either. They just watched as he blinked the dirt and grime out of his eyes and turned to look at them, his eyes were a curious color. At a glance they might label them as brown, but closer they saw flecks of gold, like a dragon's. He looked at them and in that moment they knew they were little more than the dust in his eyes to the man who had conquered death and burial. Then his head turned and he resumed his task of pulling his naked bleeding body out of his own personal hole in the ground.

Perhaps they had previously thought of resurrection as being a cleaner process, the man's chest and back were painted in thick black streaks of mud and he had managed to cut himself in the chest as well creating fresh grooves in his skin, because none of them had any inclination or desire to return to the process of their own unfinished funeral. They also had no desire to aid the man and it appeared that he did not desire their help either. Perhaps they liked to imagine it was a private process, rising from the dead, or maybe they recognized that in his eyes they were indistinguishable from the rain and the graves and the sky. One by one they turned away from the grave they came to attend, the funeral they meant to have, and turn back to where they came from. Resurrection does ruin the mood of the funeral.

So it came to be that Light Yagami found himself standing naked and alone standing in a graveyard.

* * *

By the time he reached pavement his feet were bleeding. The grass had been soft enough, but his feet were unworn and he had reached the gravel parking lot sooner than expected. Though he limped slightly he did not mind the pain extensively; it was nothing compared to the pain of the cold.

The world was so terribly cold.

Soon enough he found himself in a jacket though he didn't remember where or whom he had stolen it from. The thin cotton was soaked through before he noticed that he was wearing anything at all.

His eyes weren't working quite right either, he often had to stop so they could attempt to adjust. Light was everywhere, everything was bright and stabbing, and moving and nothing stayed in focus. Everything was blinding.

Blind, deaf, lame, and dumb he found himself in a gray landscape with trees made of iron and people without faces (buildings, like a city, a distant voice that seemed far too sensible to belong to him said dimly). He watched the ground and his traitorous feet for a sign of stumbling, the bleeding was worsening with every step. He wondered when he would not be able to walk altogether.

Once he saw a little girl and her mother looking at him, the mother backing away slowly but the girl simply staring, and pointing at him. He looked down and saw nothing, only the dirt and the blood.

Something in his head was screaming at him, something unintelligible and alien was screaming away in his head, the voice was like sunlight that bright jagged light that burned his eyes until he could see nothing but white. He walked on and ignored it, attempted to ignore it, but it was unusually loud. (This is the end?! This, is the end?!)

He hadn't remembered ever being so cold.

He felt as if there was something missing, some burden he should have been carrying, he had carried nothing when he came out. He had only felt the suffocation and the closing in and the wood and the death and he had felt nothing else. Still, there was some pain that he had forgotten to take with him, something he had left behind.

Three red roses, one at the wrist, the waist, and the shoulder. The fourth, hidden away, beneath his skin, frozen in time by the winter's chill that came with a name.

He had left the garden for someone else to tend.

He stopped walking and looked back over his shoulder. It was night then, twilight had passed by unnoticed. The rain too, had stopped, though the stolen coat was still damp. He brushed some of the grime out of his eye suddenly transfixed by a streetlamp. That captured star, he thought, had anything else ever been so beautiful? Yet the city was full of stars, too many stars caught and captured, pressed together they fought to outshine one another until all that could be seen was the electromagnetic fire. Had anything ever been so horrifying?

He couldn't say.

He wanted to speak then, to say something that he had forgotten, something of importance. The streaks of tears on his cheeks prevented him, the world blurred of its own accord, and he felt his thoughts slipping away like the mist.

He walked on.

The voice in his head was louder and more distinct this time. It was no longer an unintelligible beast that prowled and hunted and slammed itself against the walls. It thought and it watched and it had more of a sense of direction than he himself had ever possessed.

(I'll find them, I'll find all of them, and I'll kill them. One by one until they'll have nothing left, until they'll be like I was. Trapped in a yellow warehouse begging in their own pool of blood. I will kill each and every one of them. I owe it to them. They owe it to me. It is fate. It is…

Out, out, damned spot.)

He ran into a man on the street, the man turned to look at him a quirk of his eyebrows and his lips tugging into a frown. He backed up slightly holding up his hands in apology. He attempted to find his vocal chords but he felt as if they had been lost in the shuffle. He eventually found them lodged in the throat.

"Sorry." He said, surprised at the quality of the voice, he had always thought he sounded louder. The man turned and walked on, he did the same.

He began to read the names of the streets some of them striking distant chords of familiarity within him, like bells they reverberated drowning out that screaming in his head for a few precious moments. He'd pause and read the words again. He'd see better, brighter, days on these streets. On those days there had been birds perched upon the street lamps and the sun had hung high in the sky, a benevolent watchful eye of some god whose name he had forgotten.

He stood, bare legs, bare feet, hands in coat pocket looking at the sky for some sign of light. Something. Anything to take away from the screaming.

(How dare they? How could it have ended like that? They disposed of him as if he were nothing, as if it had all been for… It wasn't for nothing. That didn't make it worthless. All those years. All the lives spent and wasted. No, not for nothing.

He'd find them. He'd start with the ones that didn't matter and work his way down. He'd descend leaving the child for last. His judge and executioner, yes, he'd be the last. He'd find him, he'd find him and take that mask from him. Rip the mask away. Rip it away until he had nothing! Until he was bleeding and naked in his own grave.

No, it wasn't for…)

He brushed auburn hair out of his eyes and watched the street lamps for any sign of light.

And it was cold and it was sharp and it was so very jagged and bright.

As he stared at the absent stars and the glowing streetlamps his mind ran over faces he had assumed he had forgotten. A girl, a young woman, in a wheel chair staring at nothingness as if she had already died; her eyes had once been so very bright. Something about that face, those dead empty eyes staring at him, felt as if someone had pushed a silver pin into his chest and just let it rest there.

He took a deep breath and closed his eyes. His feet began moving and this time he felt as if he had a destination. A place to be, a place to go home to, somewhere, anywhere away from the shouting and the noise and the faces that should have been forgotten.

He brushed past the people who didn't matter, ignoring all their chatter and their lives, he knew how they would play out anyway. They were same person repeated infinitely reading off the same script. He no longer read the street signs but instead made his way by instinct into the heart of the city ducking his head so that he would not see the great towers scraping clouds from the sky.

In his mind the words fell into a rhythm, like the beating of drums.

(He'd find them, each of them, watch them suffer. Watch them bleed. He'd restart, He'd find a notebook, he could start over. He knew he could. Hadn't he proved that? Hadn't he proved that he could do anything he wanted with enough time and patience? There were no limits. Not even death was a limit… No, not even death.)

His feet stopped and he looked at the building in front of him. Forbidding glass stared back at him. He caught sight of his own reflection in the door. He didn't recognize himself. There stood the image of a young man in the doorway, hardly older than seventeen (though it was hard to tell for his eyes were so dark and jagged). His hair dark and wet with rain, sticking to his face, almost obscuring the amber eyes. Hands in pockets, shaking, feet and legs bare. And the blood and dirt dripping over everything.

He looked like he had crawled through hell and back.

The thought made him smile.

(And all those faces in his head, marching past him, with dead and dying eyes…

Out, out, damned spot.)

* * *

Matsuda had outlived Yagami Light by ten years.

That statement, he felt, was perhaps the most defining of his life. There were other things he could have said to introduce himself, but they lacked something essential, something absolutely necessary to say.

It wasn't really important that Matsuda was a policeman, that Matsuda had effectively ended the Kira case, or that Matsuda had been single for some time. No, it was far more important that Matsuda had lived and that Light Yagami had died.

Light had died only a few weeks before turning twenty four. He had been shot to death by a policeman and had his heart ripped out of him by a god of death. Those too were insignificant details though; it wasn't important how he died. Or at least, that's what Matsuda told himself.

It wasn't really about morals, because if someone made it about morals then it didn't make any sense to back Light blindfolded against a wall and shoot him through the chest three times for good measure. It was about survival, they had been balancing on the knife's edge, and someone had to fall…

Still, Aizawa didn't have any blood on his hands, he didn't really understand.

Misa died too, shortly after Light. She had lasted a few months, staring at nothing, looking at Matsuda as if she too had already died. There was no accusation, at least not through words, there had been with Sachiko. There was no cursing or weeping, she just clasped her hands and looked at her feet and told him quietly that she'd like to be alone for a while.

In the end, in the end Light was all she really ever had.

Matsuda didn't blame her, although he said he did, said she should have gotten better and gone on living. It wasn't as if Light had been all that great to her anyway, had treated her like garbage, as if she was worthless.

(Those were Aizawa's words though, Aizawa tried to justify everything through the incessant blaming of Light. It sometimes worked.)

Matsuda did not blame Misa. Not even when he heard about how she had jumped from the roof of a building far too high. He always knew she would jump, no sleeping pills for Misa, if given a choice she would run and fly before she fell.

Matsuda hadn't seen Sayu Yagami in nine years. It wasn't as if she had thrown him out of her house and life. Something had just… broken. There wasn't room for him anymore, without Light, there was no pretense for him. They'd be in the same room but it was as if she was separated behind one-way glass, not seeing him, only looking back at herself.

(Every night he prayed that he wouldn't read in the paper about how she fell asleep, too many pills, and hadn't woken up.)

Matsuda had been returning home from a night of desperate drinking. He often played drinking games with himself now. Times changed. It wasn't like right after the Kira case when justification was everywhere and it looked like they really had won a war. Ten years and you stop seeing the reason for anything. You just see the body count.

So many things had changed. Aizawa had retired, was a proud father, his kids would be graduating in a few years. Matsuda would attend the graduation and congratulate his comrade and arms and his friend, pretending all the while that they weren't standing on Light's grave.

Near, too, had retired. Five years ago the detective L had announced that it was the end, without warning, without a word after; he might as well have died. He had disappeared into whatever life awaited a dead detective. Matsuda hadn't seen or heard from him since then.

Everyone moved on.

Except for Matsuda; Matsuda never moved on.

The night air had been cool on his face, he had readjusted his coat thinking of all the things he should have been doing. Drowning the past, as entertaining and successful as it sounded, as a general rule didn't work. If it did work he usually ended up drowning the present as well until he'd wake up in a hotel room that he didn't remember coming to with a woman he had never met.

What on earth could he have told them to get them there?

Hello, my name is Matsuda, I've outlived Yagami Light by ten years.

He had been staring at the streets watching the cars, thinking of all the things he should have been doing, the people he should have been meeting. Moving on, the whole world had moved on. Or so he had thought, for ten years he had thought that, and it only took an instant and his thoughts were shattered.

The world moved on except for when it didn't. Some things leave scars; scars so powerful and poignant they can't fall to the bottom of the river with the rest of the silt of history.

Matsuda stared out at the scarlet eyes gazing at him out of the back of cars when Light Yagami passed by.

What was so interesting was that Light looked nothing like Light. He had been wearing nothing but a tan wrinkled coat that came down about halfway down his thighs. His feet were covered in dirt and blood and every time he took a step he limped a little. His hair had grown; it looked darker too, almost concealing his eyes. It was his eyes, smudged by shadows rubbed beneath either by dirt or death, which triggered the recognition.

And then he was gone. His back to Matsuda as he made his way slowly but surely down the street his eyes locked on the ground in front of him. Looking at the earth as if it was something to be mistrusted, an enemy to be conquered, just another obstacle.

Matsuda wasn't even aware he had begun to follow him until they had crossed at least two blocks. He hadn't even thought that he might have been a hallucination induced by alcohol poisoning. He had just followed steadily behind, feeling like running, and saying nothing.

Light never turned, never looked back, he must have heard. He must have noticed. He just walked.

He would pause every once in a while to view a street lamp, a street name, and then would shake his head and keep walking, never looking behind.

There was something about the way Light looked beneath the street lamp, in the light drizzle. His face had been bathed in a golden light, softening the harsh paleness and the blood and grit, making him look not only angelic but alive. Light looked alive, bathed in the golden light that had always accompanied him in life. But then he walked away and he was a ghost in a coat again.

Matsuda couldn't do anything but follow.

The defining moments in his life, the truly defining moments, weren't built on thought and planning. Matsuda's life was built on impulse. Impulsively he had fought for the Kira case, cared for Light. Impulsively he had shot Light to death in a warehouse. Impulsively he followed Light Yagami to the old headquarters building.

The building hadn't been used immediately after L had died and they had lost funding. It had been abandoned for a long time. It was marked as soon to be turned into condominiums, he hoped for their sake that L's, Rem's, and Watari's ghosts didn't linger. The dust was everywhere.

Light stood, looking at himself in the glass doors, as if for the first time. His head cocked to the side and he frowned as if trying to see if it was really someone he knew in that glass. Eventually he turned with a shake of his head and a smile.

There was a crash, broken glass, and then Light and his bleeding feet were through the broken door and into the building. The alarms had long since been dead. He didn't even look like he minded the glass, or noticed it at all.

Matsuda followed.

Past the long dead computers (ghosts), up the glass stairs coated in dust, up they climbed. Light ahead and Matsuda always five steps behind, he must have known, he was leading Matsuda somewhere how could he not know?

(Oh god, so this was the end. Lured by a hallucination of the most dangerous man he had ever met to his death. He was walking right into a trap and he knew it too, but it didn't make a difference. It never made a difference with Light, even three bullets and a goddamn heart attack hadn't made much of a difference…)

Light left his bleeding foot prints on the glass stair case as they climbed, and Matsuda couldn't help that maybe the sleeping princess Aurora waited at the top of that tower, and that Light had travelled through hell and back in order that he might reawaken what should have remained dreaming.

They climbed and eventually Light reached the tower door, he paused slightly, then his hand jerked forward and he was through the door. Matsuda was left staring at a door in horror.

He was thinking for the first time. He had been given an out by Light. Light had given him a way out. He could turn back, he could go away, he could write it off as a hallucination. It probably was a hallucination (even Yagami Light didn't come back from the dead). If he walked through that door he would either become insane or he would die. If Light wasn't real then he would slip further into insanity, this was just the glimpse, just the crack in the window. However, if Light was real…

Sometimes though, it was better to remain dreaming, and so Matsuda opened the door and walked through on the roof top to see Light Yagami, covered in blood and dirt standing on the edge of the abyss ready to jump.

"Light!"

(Matsuda hadn't said that, someone else must have, it couldn't have been him. But Light turned so he must have said something, Light was looking at him and there was nothing in him, nothing at all, just a strange glow in his eyes that hadn't been there before…)

Matsuda cleared his throat and began to slowly walk toward Light, but Light didn't move, he just watched out of narrowed eyes, "Light, it's Matsuda. Remember, from before, it's Matsuda. It's okay, I'm not going to… I'm not gonna hurt you Light."

Light wasn't moving, he just stood on the edge and watched. Matsuda felt himself shuddering inside, something breaking, as he saw what was left of Light after death. It wasn't just the blood, it wasn't the dirt either, it was his eyes that had none of Light's pride or joy… nothing at all.

"How is this…? Is it really you? Are… Are you back? Can't you… Can't you say something? What was it like? Was it… was it bad? How did you come back? Light, you have to talk to me, just say something. Just say, say anything. Come on, Light. Please, just let me know you're really alive… Light. Light! Say something, damn you!"

Light did move then, he looked out over the horizon, his eyes tracing the clouds and the city lights. His hands in his pockets and the wind beginning to whip dangerously. He was standing so very close to the edge.

Matsuda moved closer, close enough to grab Light if he fell, or jumped. Light didn't even look.

"Light, please, can you come down?" Matsuda paused before adding in a cracking voice, "I'd feel better if you came down…"

Light turned his head slowly. His eyes were still very sharp, but they reflected light the way a knife did, his old eyes had been wells. Throw a stone in them and you could see the ripples of thought. There was nothing, only glaring light burning away; a will-o-wisp luring those who dared glance away from the world of the living; taking them to that place where Light resided. There was no smile there, no victorious grin, nothing at all.

Matsuda could say nothing, could only stare at his own curved pathetic reflection in the eyes that had seen the world of the dead. His mouth was open and he stared.

"Is this hell?"

(And Light said no more.)

* * *

**Author's Note: Because resurrection would be the most traumatizing experience ever. Thanks to Scourge of Nemo for the beta job also thank you to those who read, please review.**

**Disclaimer: I don't own Death Note**


	2. Chapter 2

He sat in Matsuda's apartment as a ragged god. In Matsuda's borrowed clothing (a tad too large) he looked like a child, or rather a doll—something that simply screamed emptiness. Matsuda swore that if he looked hard enough, he would see the stitches holding the dead man in place.

Matsuda sat across from him, wondering if he'd be able to see Light's eyes under the overgrown auburn hair, but those empty eyes seemed caught upon a stain in the carpet and Matsuda could no longer see them truly did look like a god, or some forgotten spirit who had wandered accidentally into the human realm. Whatever humanity had died with Yagami Light had stayed in his grave.

Matsuda had removed Light from the edge of the headquarters building, carefully guiding his bleeding feet over the shards of glass. He'd pulled on Light's hand, pale as fish bones, and guided him through the streets. Light had said nothing; he hadn't even looked at Matsuda, had just stared ahead and stumbled behind on those bleeding feet.

Matsuda thought he had gotten most of the blood and grime off. He had bandaged the feet and pulled out the glass, yet Light still looked so terribly empty and inhuman. He still looked like he was on the edge of the roof, about to fall…

"Light, where were you?" was all that Matsuda could think to say to the man (or the boy—he could no longer truly tell).

Light looked up, his eyes the same as they had been. Nothing had really changed. Now he just lacked the height from which to jump so easily. Light looked down at his feet as if noticing the bandages for the first time, then looked back up, eyes wide and confused in a way that reminded Matsuda of those days Light spent in confinement, lying through his teeth.

It was then that Matsuda remembered that the ghost doesn't have to say anything; it must only linger, and stare, and bleed. Nothing more.

"Was it… Was it painful?" Matsuda asked slowly, waiting for some acknowledgement, some sort of goddamn reaction.

Light simply stared (like the ghost he was) and the seconds wore on. Eventually, he twitched his head.

No, so then no, it wasn't painful. He hadn't been punished, not really, not after death. That was good… Or was it? Matsuda looked at his apartment (away from Light), wondering if he would have felt better if he'd had some divine justification for killing Yagami Light. Perhaps it was better that Light only felt pain in the real world, the living world; it's what he had always been promised.

Matsuda searched for something else to say then, but words escaped him, and he wondered what most men said to the man they sent to death. Macbeth had gone crazy at his dinner party, but Matsuda wasn't having dinner and he wasn't having a party… No, it was just him and Light sitting in his apartment and Light staring at…

There was something wrong with him, something horrifyingly wrong, there had always been a spark of life in Light. An ember that burned in his eyes even at the end when everyone was dead and there was no hope left. This thing in Light's body, this marionette, was not Light. Light was dead, the dead didn't just come back, how could they? But then… Then Light had never been a man to begin with, even when human he had been steadily making his way into godhood.

"You're probably hungry." Matsuda interrupted himself and stood then making his way to the small kitchenette wondering if he had any food lying around.

Light didn't answer; he simply tracked Matsuda's movements with dull eyes, no expression on his face. His head turned slowly to follow Matsuda's movements and his eyes never wavered, never blinked. At least, Matsuda thought, he wasn't staring at stains in the carpet anymore.

"I'm not sure what I have, living on your own… well you know… my bachelor pad is pretty lacking but it's home, just not always the place for great food…" Matsuda trailed off as he searched his cupboards for anything other than granola bars and pocky. He closed each drawer and cupboard with a sizable dent in sound, as if to drive off the silence that was slowly but surely flooding the room.

He eventually settled on granola and brought two out of a box, one for himself and one for the stranger with a familiar face. He smiled as he turned around, "I don't know if you've noticed but I've been living on my own for a while, it seems kind of obvious to me… Not exactly the greatest apartment, the greatest furniture but… Things move on and I didn't."

The doll cocked its head a flicker of expression in its eyes before it was quickly snuffed out.

"You're probably curious how long it's been." Matsuda said looking at Light (it was Light it had to be Light even if he said nothing, thought nothing, did nothing…), "Things haven't changed as much as you probably thought they would have, people have moved on but they haven't really changed. We just… keep going."

The doll in his apartment said nothing.

"You know, you can talk to me. I… I won't hurt you… Not like…" Matsuda felt the words were lacking some vital entity, and that they were bleeding to death before they had even left the womb. They were born above the grave with Light Yagami's dead eyes staring up at them from the hole into the ground where they would soon reside with him.

Light looked away from him then, stood, and walked to the window where the stars had yet to reveal themselves against the glare of the city lights. He leaned against the window sill so very casually, calmly, as if Matsuda was not even in the same universe as him. As if his death had never happened, as if that past life was only a dream that could only vaguely be remembered.

"I won't hurt you." Matsuda said more steadily, "I promise."

* * *

It was a dollhouse.

A carefully crafted place where children could play pretend.

He was the doll and his world was made of cardboard.

In the background a clock ticked, the hum of the lights could be heard, and his feet tapped against the tile floor in the kitchen. In the living room a few paces away a dreary color of carpet awaited, softer than the floor but still enough pain that he felt the need to crawl (why was it only here that the pain emerged, all hands and teeth?) until all he could do was sit himself at the table and wait for the inevitable. Wait for the feet to stop bleeding and the swelling to diminish and the pain to skulk elsewhere to that place beyond the abyss.

Yet, even then, he was only a doll in a cardboard box.

The man who was called Light Yagami sat dimly with a piece of paper in front of him wondering what words might spill themselves if he dared to set a pen to paper. The pen tapped out a rhythm against the paper, a steady drumbeat that served as the only constant (incessant) reminder of reality. He frowned staring at the blank page thinking for a moment that it was his own reflection, that the paper had become a mirror, and that his face had turned into snow (a doll's) and he reflected nothing.

(Once, he thought dimly, I wouldn't have even considered that possibility. There was no world in which Light Yagami did not exist. It was not conceivable.)

It was a very good attempt at reality, he'd give them that. One could almost not see that the walls were made of paper and that the furniture was plastic, if one didn't look closely he wouldn't have seen it at all. Yet as soon as he was alone everything took on that manufactured glare, everything glinted and sparkled. Everything was superficial, even Light Yagami himself.

(Reality was far grittier. Reality screamed and writhed, tore through flesh into the marrow of bone, delicately slid three pin-needles into his heart to leave them there and watch as he bled. Reality was blood-screaming-dying-don't-let-me-die-I'm-not-ready-I-said-I-don't-want-to…)

He found that he didn't particularly enjoy this trend of thoughts.

Matsuda (or so he had called himself on the edge of the world; on that roof top that had almost been too high) had left and the man who was a stranger to himself found that he didn't like being left alone with his thoughts. He wanted the history Matsuda had provided him (however much it glinted) he wanted a name, to be nameless was… There was something horrifyingly inhuman in that thought.

(His feet stung and he wondered if he needed to change the bandages.)

There was something in the edge of his mind that had been pushed out in that blinding confusion, the initial terror of being born, that was slowly but surely creeping its way back. Through the woods it prowled, with name and past, to the point in the clearing where he waited and it would consume him there. (There was Matsuda's story, his unnamed history, the one he sought so desperately. They were playing right into his hands and they both knew it…)

He uncapped the pen and wrote the name that had been resting on his mind.

Light Yagami.

He crossed it out in a single black line and wrote it again, slightly more slanted. He crossed this name out as well. He repeated this process five times then dropped the pen.

The paper stared at him then, its face marred with the scarred remains of a dead man's name, the name of that dreaded drum beat in the back of his mind luring him into remembrance. He was not entirely sure he wished to remember.

(Gun against his head. Father's eyes. Cackling in the background. A yellow warehouse. An empty grave at sunset. Bleeding. Screaming…)

It pounded, how that blind rage and betrayal pounded.

Resentment, loneliness, anger, pride, betrayal, rage, disappointment, desperation… So many emotions pounding just behind his eyelids if he would only look.

He would not look…

"If I don't look, then I will remain a doll." He said to the room, to the empty reflection scarred by a name he felt was descending upon him. He spoke to the light fixtures and their glinting superficial nature. His voice felt unused, young, still in search of its purpose and destiny.

"If I run I will remain nameless." He paused closing his eyes and seeing nothing but the abyss, "If I remain nameless I will be consumed."

The room did not answer but the wolf inside his mind was grinning. It was then that the man who called himself Light Yagami began to comprehend his mortal state.

There were no choices, this was only temporary, this state of dull non-remembrance. He would return to himself…

Something about that thought was reminiscent of the barrel of a gun against his head, in the back seat of a car, dressed in white trying to look anywhere but into those heartless dead eyes across from him. The ravens had waited outside the car window that day as well.

He crumpled the paper and drew a new sheet, a new blank (familiar) face staring back at him. The pen resumed its tapping almost of its own accord.

(It was a dollhouse.)

His feet stung and he wondered if he should change the bandages.

* * *

He wasn't sure what he expected to find there.

Matsuda stared down the rabbit hole in vain to find the portal that had let in a man who was supposed to have died. Torn fragments of a blue suit outlined the edges of the hole Matsuda reached and picked one up tracing the threads of blood that had worked their way into the stiff fabric.

He closed his eyes and closed his fist with the fabric clenched inside and felt for the tears trickle down his face without seeing them at all.

There was something hideous about an empty grave. Who had grieved for Light? Who had left flowers at his grave? In ten years they had all managed to leave him behind, even Matsuda who thought he never could, they all looked back and pretended they still cared. Oh yes, how they pretended to grieve, looking down the inside of their beer bottles, counting the years, counting the deaths… and yet no one had been there when he came back (just as no one had truly been there when he died).

(In many ways Matsuda was the author of his own melodrama and Light Yagami was a plot point for convenience sake. A little trifle that made Matsuda a little more interesting, a little different from anyone else. Matsuda had been on the Kira case, had watched him die, and had killed him with three bullets…)

And so Light had pulled himself from death, naked and bleeding, to find himself desperately alone in a world that no longer remembered him.

He had pulled himself out of his own grave. That explained the blood and the cuts that would soon be scars. It explained the lack of clothing. It explained that wild eyed, suffocated, look of desperation on the roof top. It explained the almost broken fingers covered in dirt, blood, and broken fingernails. It explained the screaming as Matsuda attempted to clean the worst of the cuts…

He wondered why there wasn't caution tape, wasn't anything. Hadn't anyone seen it? Hadn't anyone seen him come back? Couldn't they have at least tried to help? (Matsuda wiped away the tears that were blurring his vision, he couldn't even see the grave properly anymore…)

He knew though, he knew what they must have thought. Someone's idea of a prank, a horrible prank, they should be put in jail for that. Damn kids, it's sick. It's terribly sick, to pretend that people can come back (that people crawl back out of whatever hole they were in). They'd fix the grave in the morning and find where the damn kids put the body. Nothing supernatural, just sickening, a joke taken too far.

No caution tape. No crime. Who would steal a corpse anyway? They're dead anyway. No one wants them, no one cares. (And so Light Yagami had pulled his bleeding body out of the hole in the ground he had been placed in only to find himself naked bleeding and terribly alone.)

Matsuda stuffed his hands in his pockets feeling unreasonably cold considering the mild weather. He should have brought a heavier jacket.

He wondered dimly if anyone was going to clean it up. It looked so empty, so… grotesque. No one walked near it, no one looked down at it, no one looked at all. He had the sudden urge to fill the hole, to make it look like it had never been disturbed, never been moved, like the hole had never existed in the first place.

That's just what was done with Light, he was put aside, shoved in corners of memories, and justified away as something that needed to be done. They'd been doing it for years, what was one more dismissal now?

Matsuda had outlived Light Yagami by ten years now, until he came back, until he crawled out of his grave. Then Light Yagami wasn't dead anymore, and Matsuda didn't have any statement anymore, and everything changed.

But maybe it wasn't really Light, maybe it was someone's sick idea of a joke. Near had quit his detective business but maybe he thought it would be good to remind the old task force of their place in the world. Just some guy that looked like Light (exactly like Light) but who pretended to be a trauma victim (it didn't seem pretend, no one would ever have guessed that even after pulling himself out of hell Light could be so empty) just a joke that would later be revealed. Ha, fooled you, Light Yagami has been dead for ten years.

And then Nathan Rivers would be waiting in Matsuda's apartment with a smile just like Light's and it would all be a misunderstanding. Just a cruel joke gone too far… (But who would have asked an actor to bleed the way he did?)

It was a very disconcerting thing, to stare down into an empty grave, almost like one was looking straight into the world beyond death. Mu, nothingness, stored safely underground. (Had he ripped a hole in reality, just to get out?)

No, he picked up his old trend of thoughts, he didn't really believe that Light was an actor; someone paid by Nathan Rivers to make trouble. Light used to be so hidden, so careful, so very practiced… If anyone had been attempting to attempt a Light resurrected they would never have conveyed the raw, desperate, dazed man who sat at his kitchen table.

(That was what really horrified him. Not the fact that Light, _Light Yagami_, had resurrected himself after ten years. That, despite being deemed impossible, wasn't truly surprising. It was seeing what death had turned Light into, what it had stolen from him, and to see what it would probably do to the rest of them as well. But then, if Light had truly come back, then he would have killed Matsuda on sight, so maybe he was better off with this hollowed out shell…)

Sometimes even Matsuda wasn't sure just what he wanted. Just came with the job, he supposed, when you were one of the officers who lived through Kira.

(Someone should really think about filling the hole, it wasn't decent, wasn't respectful. No one wanted to see an empty grave in a graveyard.)

He was trying to think of what to do. Something had to be done. Light had come back from the dead, that didn't happen every day, something had to change…

He would have to consult the others, but they would never believe him, unless they had no other choice. Light had returned, the big bad was back, but at the same time he wasn't really. Something had to… Matsuda didn't know what to do.

He was hoping the grave would give him some ideas.

It just looked so terribly empty.

Matsuda sighed and turned from the graven shaking his head, his footsteps heavier than usual, and began the long walk home.

* * *

"You don't remember anything, do you?"

The man who sometimes called himself Light (when he was feeling in the mood) managed to smile at that comment. It was the disappointed tone that caught him, as if Matsuda had been expecting something else entirely and wasn't quite sure how he felt about it.

At his approach the young man with the bandages on his feet (still bleeding) had set down his pen and given him his full attention. This attention did not waver now that a question had been asked, he stared, and waited with a smile to see what Matsuda might make of the beast that prowled inside his mind.

"You don't even remember your name do you?" Matsuda restated, sitting down on the other side of the table with an expression of horrified wonderment.

Light Yagami. Who could forget a name like that?

Matsuda only stared at him with that same expression as if waiting for something to happen, but there was only the reflection of the cheap table, the glinting of the lights, and the blank papers scattered haphazardly.

"Do you want to know?" Matsuda managed to ask finally in that same tone of voice, one that expected so much and yet received more and less than it expected.

His smile grew into a grin, "I expect I don't have a choice."

Matsuda seemed surprised by his words, "I'm sorry I don't understand…"

Light folded his hands together and looked down at them with a musing expression, "I am myself. All the faint, distant, jagged pieces of myself. I will remain myself when I can face what I truly am. When I face the bullets, and the executioners, and the heart attacks, and all those things that never leave… All the things that pound in my mind, the images, the voices, all the memories that will never let me die. "

He looked up and noticed that Matsuda's face had changed, he had grown paler and his eyes were beginning to water, his mouth had gained grooves, and he looked for all the world as if this table was the last place he wished to be. He opened his mouth as if to say something then closed it and looked away again.

(Someone screaming at him, you killed your own father, bullets in the flesh. Faces everywhere. Nowhere left to run. No one left to turn to. His heart, a failing faltering drum, lost as the faces grew nearer.)

He looked at the white pieces of paper, his pseudo reflection, and saw invisible threads of blood dripping down until his reflection was soaked in blood. His hands were shaking again, he hid them beneath the table but he knew that the other man had already seen.

"Just tell me if you want to talk…" Matsuda muttered slowly, more to the table than to the man sitting across from him.

(A girl with eyes glazed over like a dead fish, like his own corpse, sitting in a wheel chair. A man falling to the floor, a spoon dropping, and his eyes slowly but surely drifting closed…)

"What is there to say?" He said coldly.

"Do you remember?" Matsuda asked slowly as if this was important as if it mattered at all.

"Does it truly matter?"

"Yes." Matsuda said calmly with conviction as if there could be no argument against this.

There was only one path for Light Yagami and he would have to live it, relive it, delve into the mind that he felt had been thrust onto him by someone else. Far better to have remained dead, they would wish Light Yagami (Kira) had never been born by the time they were finished with him.

In the meantime the memories pounded away and he looked at anywhere but his own reflection and Light refused to humor a man so desperate as Mr. Touta Matsuda.

* * *

Matsuda had found the list of questions online, it had been a whim, but he usually followed his whims and most of the time they didn't turn out too badly.

He had come in smiling and placed the stack of questions in front of the dazed Light who had been making his first forays into the world of television. He looked up at Matsuda and something of his old attitude, the exhausted exasperation, showed on his face. Good. That was good.

"Do you want something?" Light asked slowly his eyes focused on the television but clearly seeing nothing, as if it was just a parade of images without sense or meaning.

"We're going to play a game." Matsuda stated looking down at Light.

Light's eyes moved at that, to gaze at Matsuda, the sharpness returning and that otherworldly light growing more substantial. Those other colors (the aurora) that sometimes drifted through his eyes and in them Matsuda caught a flash of red. "A game?" He asked.

(And Matsuda had the flash of intuition that Light's games were not the same as his. Light's games were played with the world, with people, and with notebooks…)

"Yeah, a question game; icebreakers. I don't know about you but I think we didn't really learn that much about each other the last time around, I'd like a second chance to get to know you." Matsuda said slowly drawing the questions in front of Light and watching for any change in expression.

For a moment it was Light's smile that greeted Matsuda, that cold humored smile, not quite reaching his eyes, the smile he gave L toward the end of the Yotsuba investigation. The smile he saved for Near, for Misa when she wasn't looking… Then it was gone.

"Alright Matsuda, I'll play your game." He consented.

(He did not offer an excuse such as he had nothing better to do, or it would be fun, he was allowing Matsuda to play with him. He was offering Matsuda a privilege that he would never see again. It was a favor that would be taken back at a later date)

"Good." Matsuda said and drew out the list of questions all of them suddenly seeming too inadequate and far too shallow to be of any use. But then, maybe that was what Light had needed, he'd needed an escape from the world he had attempted to create for himself. He'd needed shallow human frivolity to escape becoming God.

Matsuda held the questions in front of him and read the first, "If you could have a superpower, any one you wanted, what would it be and why?"

He had expected a faster reaction but then he realized exactly what he was asking and what memories he would be bringing up. Matsuda hastily added as the silence wore on, "You don't have to answer if you don't want to, we could go on to the next question."

Light answered though and all Matsuda could do was stare and think how unfamiliar he looked (he flashed in and out of familiarity so that Matsuda could only catch glimpses of the man he used to know), "I would never die. All other powers are irrelevant." That inhuman glare in his eyes was back, until his eyes were not gold anymore but a multitude of colors, "Anything else, I can do on my own."

Matsuda nodded slowly and said to nothing in particular, certainly not to Light, "I'd be able to change time."

Light said nothing but Matsuda knew he was listening as Matsuda swallowed and thought of Light's dead body abandoned in a warehouse before it was thrown underground. Matsuda didn't look at Light but added, "So that I could change things, if they were wrong… And it'd be pretty cool, too, don't you think?"

(But Light didn't think, didn't share, only stared and watched as the nonsense streamed past him with dull amber eyes.)

Before him the questions suddenly seemed inadequate, terribly inadequate, and so the silence grew and Matsuda threw the questions in the recycling. Tomorrow, he knew, there would be a new list on the internet.

* * *

**Author's Note: Thanks for reading reviews would be excellent. **

**Disclaimer: I don't own Death Note**


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